Why Google Docs Succeeded and Bing Failed

A thought experiment for evaluating the potential of your product ideas

Simon Li
Bootcamp
Published in
3 min readAug 24, 2023

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This is part of the series on how design can help you build better product.

Thought Experiment

At the end of the previous article Say No to Dogmatism in UX Design, there’s a list of questions for you to examine your product ideas.

  • Is there a user pain or problem here?
  • Is the pain painful enough?
  • Is there an existing solution?
  • Is the existing solution good enough?
  • Is this the right problem to solve?

By answering the questions above, you’ll be able to have a more realistic estimate of the potential of your ideas.

Let’s take a look at a few other examples that include some of the products that we’re all pretty familiar with and analyze their success or failure using the list of questions that we just saw.

Microsoft Word vs Google Docs

Word and Google Docs are quite similar. They are both word processing software. Why was Google Docs able to take away market shares from Word while the new Dovrak and Colemak layouts weren’t able to compete with QWERTY?

Well, that’s because Google Docs is a pioneer in allowing multiple users to collaborate on a document online in real time. This convenient feature created a significant amount of value for users far beyond the improvement in efficiency delivered by the new keyboard layouts. The experience of this feature is intuitive and doesn’t require much learning. The value offered by this feature successfully differentiated Google Docs from Word and therefore enabled Google Docs to take away market share from Microsoft Word.

Google vs Bing

Now let’s compare Google and Bing. Both are search engines. As you may know, Bing recently got an upgrade which added AI capabilities. For this example, let’s just consider the version of Bing before the upgrade. Why wasn’t Bing able to take away Google’s market share?

Well, that’s because Bing is very similar to Google in terms of value proposition.

Bing failed to create a significant amount of new value for the users through unique features and therefore failed to create a competitive edge to differentiate itself from Google. Additionally, its results were often no better than Google’s, sometimes even slightly worse. Given the excellent search results that Google had provided and the large number of existing users it already had, it was hard for Bing to gain market share.

The Impact/Effort Matrix

Now that we’re aware of the potential impact of our idea, we can decide the best way to move forward using the impact/effort matrix.

Source: https://e-qip.ca/resources/impact-effort-grid-decision-making-matrix/

If your idea has a lot of potential, then you should either work on it immediately or treat it like a major project with careful planning and execution, depending on how much effort is required to implement it.

And based on the matrix, if the impact of your idea is small, then you may want to either put it in the backlog or rethink the idea.

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Bootcamp
Bootcamp

Published in Bootcamp

From idea to product, one lesson at a time. Bootcamp is a collection of resources and opinion pieces about UX, UI, and Product. To submit your story: https://tinyurl.com/bootspub1

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